Brewery Wastewater Used To Make Batteries

Finding a use for wastewater is high on the list of priorities for many businesses who want to ‘go green’, but there might even be a chance that your liquid level gauges could be measuring extra profit if the right solution is found.

That solution may be just over the horizon for breweries – businesses which only know too well how troublesome and expensive dealing with wastewater can be – as researchers at Colorado university have been experimenting with an interesting use for waste of the brewing process, which dwarves the product made by 7:1.

The waste cannot be simply fed back into the water system as it requires extra filtration, explained the team from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering who were behind the study told Tech Radar but in that, it also provides a fertile ground for cultivating a fast-growing fungus. This fungus not only cleans the water, making it able to be fed back into the water system, but also produces another by product which can power lithium-ion battery electrodes. A win-win solution to the original problem.

A co-author of the study went on to speak of how it could be viewed as a different way to produce batteries, rather than a wastewater solution too: ““The novelty of our process is changing the manufacturing process from top-down to bottom-up,” said associate professor Zhiyong Jason Ren.

The team have filed a patent for the process and have already set up a company to commercialise the idea, meaning it could soon be something that will be available widely to breweries across the world.

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